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I was born in 1994 and have been going back and finding some of the shows and PPVs to watch that were before my time. The PPVs are easy enough to get the name of and find in the depths of the internet, but I don't know what were the shows inbetween the PPVs?

The main show was WWF Superstars, there'd be a handful of squash matches along with segments such as The Funeral Parlour or The Barber Shop which forwarded angles and such. You'd also have one "main event" match at the end which would further angles.

You also had WWF Wrestling Challenge which wasn't a "B" show as such but would feature mid-carders more than the main eventers i.e the last match would feature Tito Santana rather than Randy Savage. Same format pretty much too with interview segments, squashes and main event matches.

There was also WWF Prime Time Wrestling which was studio based and presented by such people as Jerry Lawler, Hillbilly Jim, Bobby Heenan, Gorilla Monsoon etc.

This would be more main event calibre matches and title matches. Not that title matches wouldn't appear on Superstars and Challenge but there might be a World Title or Tag Title match and a title change occasionally. It had highlights of the interview segments from the other 2 shows as well.

WCW followed a similar format. You had the main show which was WCW Saturday Night as well as WCW Pro-Wrestling and WCW Worldwide which, as Superstars and Challenge, would features squashes and main event style matches at the end.

The biggest difference is that WCW would show highlights of PPV matches, or sometimes full matches, on Pro and Worldwide as sometimes the shows were taped weeks in advance so a person might appear without a title one week on Pro yet he won the title on the PPV the night before if that makes sense.

The AWA was also on ESPN with AWA Championship Wrestling. Growing up in the Northeast in the 80s, the AWA guys seemed much more foreign to me. I was brought up in the NWA (man I miss the old NWA shows on TBS) and the WWF. Also, We got occasional Saturday Night Main Events which would be big deals

When I was little, I remember being at a department store with my dad and step mom. NBC was on one of the TV displays and they were showing Saturday Night Main Event. I wanted to watch it sooo bad (we didn't have a TV at home) but we were about to leave the store, so I ducked into one of the clothing racks when my parents weren't looking and ran back over to the TV display to watch the rest of the show. There had to have been a good half hour left in the show and I watched the entire thing. After it was done I went and found my parents again. My step mom was pretty pissed but it was worth it. Years later I found out that my dad knew full well that I was at the back of the store watching wrestling and deliberately kept my step mom on the opposite side of the store looking for me until the top of the hour. He was a pretty cool guy.

For WWE it was Superstars on Saturday afternoons after cartoons. That's where the angles would progress and you'd have the big interviews with Mean Gene and things like the Brother Love show, Barbershop and Funeral Parlor. The matches were all squashes though with mid card guys beating jobbers and an occasional Mr. Perfect vs. Tito Santana main event.

WWE also had Prime Time wrestling hosted by Monsoon and Heenan which was more entertaining. It was like a Sportscenter set up with the two of them discussing recent developments and then showing better quality match ups like Rockers vs. Orient Express which were taped at events from MSG, Boston Garden, etc. This show would evolve being hosted by Vince and Heenan which was like a version of Regis and Kathy Lee with an audience behind them and guest wrestlers who would be interviewed or involved in some skit interspersed with wrestling action. It's final version before Raw was a roundtable discussion with announcers and temporarily out of action stars like Savage and Perfect where they'd argue about recent events and of course show low quality matches. Then Raw started and changed the game forever with more competitive matches being shown in WWF.

Then of course there was Saturday Night's Main Event which was shown on NBC. It was sporadically used, airing only a few times a year and was a way to build towards the big Pay-Per-Views when they only had four per year. Some big angles would happen here like the split of the Mega Powers and was pretty close to what Raw would become.

In WCW the big show was WCW Saturday Night. This was like the WWF Superstars show in that this is where the angles would progress but it featured more competitive matches. For example you'd never see Hogan wrestle on WWF weekly TV, but WCW would always have main event guys like Sting, Luger, Rude, etc. featured. It also featured things that would take place outside of the arena such as Barry Windham's arm being broken in a parking lot by Anderson and Zybysko, which would become a staple of Raw and Nitro but hadn't been utilized by WWF yet.

They would also have a Saturday morning show called Power Hour which was more of a recap with lower quality matches like Van Hammer vs. The Gambler. The biggest show was Clash of the Champions which was the equivalent of SNME but I remember it taking place more often. The Clash shows were just about Pay-Per-View quality and the concept of the show was actually to steal viewers away from the first WWF Survivor Series by airing the Clash of the Champions for free on TBS.

Raw replaced a show hosted by Gorillas Monsoon and Bobby Heenan called Prime Time Wrestling. I never understood why they changed the name, with the format. You know how they talk about Raw being 20 years and 1000 shows, while if they kept Prime Time Wrestling they'd probably be at 30 years and lot of other shows.

I remember as a kid one of my fondest memories was whenever clash of the champions came on, my mom would let my best friend spend the night and we'd stay up watching wrestling and eating homemade frenchbread pizzas.

Back then you didn't really have main shows in the sense that we have RAW every week now. There were shows like Superstars of Wrestling which were more like talk shows with highlights/squash matches inter-spliced. In fact, even RAW was mainly squash matches until Nitro began and started to have real matches.

What people don't seem to think about is that squashes are an essential part of wrestling. They keep guys on tv when they don't have a feud, they give young talent a chance to grow in the ring, and the prevent things from getting stale too quickly. The lack of squashes is one big reason why we have 2-3 month feuds instead of 12-16 month ones.

Squash matches are a great tool for reason you stated. Just look at Ryback. In less than 6 months he was able to get over so much that he was headlining PPVs. I wouldn't mind seeing a few of those each month.

"WWF Superstars of Wrestling was a professional wrestling television program produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). It debuted on September 6, 1986. Superstars, as it would later be known, was the flagship program of the WWF's syndicated programming from its inception until the premiere of Monday Night Raw in 1993."